Nvidia: “No Longer Possible for Consoles to be Better Graphics Platform Than PC”

Tony Tamasi talks about how PCs have pulled away from consoles over the years.

With the dawn of the next generation of consoles nearing closer, one of the few companies which seems content to miss the hype train is GPU manufacturer Nvidia. Of course, the company has stated several times over that it isn’t interested in the PS4 and Xbox One, stating that both are already out-dated compared to the latest PCs. So did Nvidia’s Tony Tamasi say anything to change their stance? Unfortunately, no.

Speaking to PC PowerPlay, Tamasi stated that, “It’s no longer possible for a console to be a better or more capable graphics platform than the PC. Certainly with the first PlayStation and PS2, in that era there weren’t really good graphics on the PC. Around the time of the PS2 is when 3D really started coming to the PC, but before that time 3D was the domain of Silicon Graphics and other 3D workstations. Sony, Sega or Nintendo could invest in bringing 3D graphics to a consumer platform. In fact, the PS2 was faster than a PC.

“By the time of the Xbox 360 and PS3, the consoles were on par with the PC. If you look inside those boxes, they’re both powered by graphics technology by AMD or NVIDIA, because by that time all the graphics innovation was being done by PC graphics companies. NVIDIA spends 1.5 billion US dollars per year on research and development in graphics, every year, and in the course of a console’s lifecycle we’ll spend over 10 billion dollars into graphics research.

“Sony and Microsoft simply can’t afford to spend that kind of money. They just don’t have the investment capacity to match the PC guys; we can do it thanks to economy of scale, as we sell hundreds of millions of chips, year after year.”

When looking back on previous generations and their comparison to PCs, Tamasi stated that, “The PC graphics industry wasn’t operating at the limits of device physics and power. If you wind back the clock, a high-end graphics card at that time was maybe 75W or 100W max. We weren’t building chips that were on the most advanced semiconductor process and were billions of transistors.

“Now we’re building GPUs at the limits of what’s possible with fabrication techniques. Nobody can build anything bigger or more powerful than what is in the PC at the moment. It just is not possible, but that wasn’t the case in the last generation of consoles. Taken to the theoretical limits, the best any console could ever do would be to ship a console that is equal to the best PC at that time. But then a year later it’s going to be slower, and it still wouldn’t be possible due to the power limits.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Is all of this irrelevant to the games that will be coming out or are graphics still king? Let us know in the comments below.

I think this is sour grapes on Nvidia’s part as they are pissed because AMD got the lucrative contract for the next gen consoles and both Sony and Microsoft are reporting record breaking demand for the next gen consoles.

Comparing a $400 fixed piece of hardware that is a next gen console like the PlayStation4 or Xbox1 with the millions of different configurations of PC out there is just pointless. I could buy a $1000 nvidia geforce titan graphics card for my PC now and of course it will out power a console. I play on both PC and console and enjoy both, and I will be picking a next gen console next year as it is good price for the hardware on offer.

The much bigger threat to PCs are Tablets which are causing the PC market to implode as PC sales are at their lowest in decades.